THE ENERGY CONCEPT Of

POPULATION

 

A First Step in Social Analysis

Modern science tends more and more to view energy, in its various forms and manifestations, as the fundamental entity of all existence, and to regard all material substance and structures as special and particular and only relatively stable forms constituted by that energy and through which energy ceaselessly flows and is transformed.

   Life is a stream of energy. Population is one manifestation of that vital stream. It cannot be measured by enumeration alone more than any other stream can be measured by its volume or by the number of its units present at a given instant. In any case, the number of units must be multiplied by the mean velocity they possess and the duration of their flow. A quantity of life is not manifested by mass and movement alone or until its time or duration also is taken into account.

   The unit of measurement is thus not the individual but the individual life year. One person living one year would represent the energy flow of a single life year. A population of ten living to an average span of ten years would represent the energy of a hundred life years. A million population with an average span of twenty-five years would be a total energy manifestation of twenty-five million life years. A half million with a span of fifty years would be the same number of life years. It is clear then that the quantity of human life cannot be measured by enumeration alone. The quantity of energy may remain the same throughout great change in the numbers, if the life span inversely change. For a given quantity of life, the number of units and their average duration are dependent variables.

 

   From the foregoing it may seem of little consequence how any given quantity of life energy shall manifest itself,— whether it be in a numerous population of short lives or in a less numerous population of extended lives, so the product be the same. But that is as though we should say that a large stream of small velocity in its many units need not differ from a smaller stream with fewer units having higher velocities, so the quantity of flow remain the same; or that a current of low voltage and high amperes would be the same as a current of high voltage and fewer amperes. The quantity of energy may be in any case the same, but the amount of energy possessed by each unit, the energy charge per unit, is less in the former and greater in the latter cases. Each short-lived individual in the large population, each unit volume moving in the sluggish stream, each electron in the low voltage flow, possesses and manifests less energy than the corresponding unit in the longer lived population, the swifter stream, or the high-potential electric flow.

 

   A stream of many units of low charge or motion is subdued to its surroundings and changed by them; the flow having fewer units, but of higher unit velocity or charge, is adapted to give off energy and thereby change the form of its environment. The one is supine to externals, the tool and pawn of circumstances; the other impinges on its surroundings and thus creates or, in measure, determines the character of the external world. The low electric charge yields to resistance, flows only where it is low; the high current breaks down resistance and makes its own way. The stream of low-energy units flows as its surroundings prescribe; its course is set for it; the swift stream carves its own. The mass population of brief and, therefore, low-energy lives must yield and conform to whatever is put upon it; the population whose energy is expressed in the longer and ampler lives of its individuals can build its own world to the measure of its higher powers and to the pattern of its desires and dreams. The one is qualified to act, to create; the other only to be acted upon and to yield. The difference is not a quantitative one. To give it any meaning, we must say that it is qualitative. The merely quantitative is only acted upon; quality is that which gives the power to do, to create, and this comes only from the greater content, the higher potentials, of the individual units that comprise the stream.

 

   The emergence of this qualitative, this creative aspect, arising in any manifestation of energy by the mere transformation and higher organization of its own internal structure, without any necessary quantitative change, seems to bridge the abyss and penetrate the barrier that so long, in men’s minds, has separated the qualitative from the quantitative world. In the simple process of “stepping up” the given quantity of energy, by raising its duration or time factor — its length as a wave — with corresponding diminution of its mass and velocity component, the qualitative, the creative, side of existence is disclosed. By recognition of this qualitative transformation of energy into creative power, science, the younger brother, can be reconciled at last into the family of philosophy and religion and their spirits unite.

 

   All living things have structure, movement and length of days — mass, velocity and duration. A complex life-form is the integration of the mass, velocity and duration of the units of which it is composed. A population organized into a society is the structural and functional integration of the units that constitute it. Each unit possesses mass and movement or velocity which is the resultant or net of all it movements. The average unit possesses average mass and average velocity, and it has an average duration. The total population is the integration of its units. The population, then, may be regarded as made up of a given number of units having average mass and average velocity and having an average duration.

 

   Taking as unity the average mass and velocity, the total energy manifested in a population may be taken as the total number of units times their average duration, the product ND being expressed as a certain number of life years. The total energy of each generation is then expressed as its total number of life years.

 

   If the average mass in pounds were known to be, say, 150 and the average velocity of all its movements were known to be, say, ten feet per minute and the average duration were, say, fifty years, then the average power rate per individual would be 1500 foot pounds per minute or about .045 horsepower hours or about 15,000 kilowatt hours.

 

   It is, of course, not stated, nor meant to be suggested that the energy transformation of a life-form is expressed only in its bodily movements, but, however complex, it must all take some form or forms of energy transfer the total of which would be equivalent to some certain amount of motion of its mass. This energy in whatever complex forms it may be manifested, must have an average value for the individuals of any population, this average conveniently may be taken as constant at unity (or one hundred) throughout various changes in the one variable and definitely ascertainable energy factor, namely, the average duration of the lives. The energy, therefore, may be profoundly transformed without any change necessarily being made in its rate or amount.

 

   Since the population or energy constituting a society is constituted of living units organized together, it is a living organism, with power to reproduce itself in successive generations. Each generation may be regarded as a composite wave of energy made up of lesser waves of unequal power and duration, but having an average magnitude, just as there is an average energy magnitude for the variant rays from the sun of which its white light is composed.

 

   The quantity of energy manifested in and transformed per average unit in the organized population is its number of life years, the mean life span or duration, of that unit. The amount of energy that a population draws from its environment, transforms and returns to it in the period of each of its waves or successive generations is proportionate to its total number of life years during that period. It may be expressed as the mean number of its units times their mean duration, or as ND. The structural magnitude of each generation of population as an energy wave, then, is expressed by its number of units, N. Its duration is D, and its frequency is, of course, the reciprocal of its duration or 1/D.

 

   From the above it is clear that a living population is cosmic energy transforming and constituting itself into a complex life form through which it flows and is transformed and then returns to itself.

 

   This return of population energy to its environment modifies that environment. It transforms it either negatively or positively. If the population is but crudely organized, it is unproductive; it deteriorates its environment, reduces it to a lower level of complexity and organization less suitable to its own existence. The crude population thus shortens its own life span or wave; its environment affords it a lower order of conditions and subsistence under which it can maintain its total energy or life years and escape its own degradation or extinction into the inorganic only by an acceleration of its reproductivity in compensation of its shortened life span.

 

   But for a more completely or increasingly organized society all the reverse is true. In this population some of the energy it takes from its environment is so organized and so returned to its environment as to raise and transform it to a higher level of complexity more suitable to maintain and extend the life of the population, conformable to its needs and desires — even its dreams. Such a productive population suffers from no shortening of its wave or span. It can maintain its total life years without increasing its reproductivity. Indeed, by its creativeness and productivity upon its environment, it can so increase its span or wave, its length of days between generations, that it may suspend its reproductive function in the like proportion that it extends its days, without any loss in its total energy or life years. And not only does its higher organization of itself give it the power to re-create and transform its environing world and thus to lengthen its own lives, but this reorganized world becomes one through which new cosmic energy can most freely flow into and take, with most facility and ease the organic, the human and the social forms.

 

   Thus it is possible for a population indirectly to raise its total life years per generation, and even also the number of its individual lives, despite declining births, by the same transformation and development of its interior relationships that raises its productivity and extends its days.

 

   Let us examine the nature of the developmental social growth and change that can yield such results.

 

   In the atomic and sub-atomic world, as in the astronomical, we impute the highest organization to those systems in which the units constituting them move most freely in relation to one another. Where there is collision between the members, we find disintegration of those units and a corresponding disorganization of the system that they form.

 

   In the human and social realm the like phenomena prevail. Here are the same two relationships: that of free action and movement with respect to each other without collision and consequent disintegration, and that of collision and compulsion which disintegrates the units, inhibits the social functioning and dissolves the social bonds. The one relation is free and harmonious, being contractual and consensual; the other is compulsive, coercive and destructive, whether it be unauthorized and criminal or fully sanctioned and accepted as political and governmental. The creativeness of the one need not be obscured by the absence of conscious altruism or even by avowals of selfish intent in the minds of those who practice it; nor need the destructiveness of the other be disguised by pretensions of benevolence and philanthropy, however well intended or sincerely believed or habitually accepted or imposed.

 

   For the purpose of any qualitative comparison between two populations or of the same population within itself at different times as to its state of progress or well-being, it is necessary to keep in view always a constant quantity of energy as between the respective populations. This means that for all purposes of other than mere quantitative comparison, the product of N and D, numbers and duration, must be constant. This leaves N and D variable, and since, for the purposes of any fair qualitative comparison, their product must be kept constant, they are, for equal quantities of energy, dependent variables. Unless the total amount of energy be changed, any change in the duration or length of the lives must be accompanied by a contrary change in their number.

 

   By considering the generations of men as the propagation of energy waves having a constant average as to their mass and velocity functions but having an average frequency or wave length that differs as between different populations or at different times, depending upon the average duration of the lives, it becomes possible to employ mathematical investigation in this field. Taking a population, as a wave stream, through various changes of wave frequency, or of wave length as the wave span, it is possible by this transformation to examine what changes other than quantitative ones can take place in the energy flow. These changes are in the interior structure and organization of the energy stream itself and are not dependent upon there being any change in the quantity of the flow. We may regard, then, any changes in the operations of a society that leads to a change in its wave length or duration of the lives as a qualitative change or transformation, a higher or lower organization and functioning of the population-energy itself.

 

   Since a population-stream draws all its energy from its environment, transforms it and returns it to the environment, thus transforming its environment, one kind of change or another in its life duration or wave length will produce one kind or another of environmental change.

 

   If the change in the social organization is in the direction of collision and conflict, the free social and contractual unities and bonds will become relaxed, production of wealth and amenities will decline, the individuals will deteriorate and live shorter lives. If the change is in the direction of freedom and of contractual as opposed to compulsive and coercive engagements, then production rises, the amenities of environment as well as of circumstances are improved, and the individuals live longer and fuller lives. These changes in the social organization are qualitative, negatively and positively so, and they lead to corresponding changes in the energy stream by shortening or lengthening its waves. For the more the life span is shortened the more will its energy be repressed and reformed into frequency of reproduction; the more the lives are extended and enlarged, the more productive and creative upon the environment they become, the less reproductive they will need to be.

 

   Thus the population having a long life wave and hence a low frequency of replacement is a positively qualitative energy flow in the sense that it is dominant and creative upon its environment, raising it to a higher level of organization and assimilating the reorganized energies of its environment for its own maintenance and growth. Such a society, by reorganizing and re-creating its own environment, indirectly and by this means, builds and creates itself.

 

   The potentialities of full-span human lives are greater than those of lives cut short soon after or even before they mature. At the level of human life this qualitative difference between long-lived and short-lived populations is most extreme, for all the years of infancy are years of dependence on the mature life that has gone before. During his growth the individual is taking on and absorbing energy into his structure; his social and creative potentiality is accumulating; it is not effective until maturity; only then can he become a positive asset, a contributing part of the energy, of the stream of life, in which he flows.

 

   From this view, it is seen that the quality and potentiality of a population, its power to transform itself through rebuilding its environing world, depends not alone upon the mere number or quantity of its life years, but rather upon the quantity of its life years that extend beyond the period of infancy and immaturity of its members. For there can be no productivity in anything that has no life or power beyond that required for its own maintenance, replacement or reproduction.

 

   Taking twenty as the age of maturity, a million population with average span of twenty-five years has a total of but five million, only one-fifth of its life years, on the asset side. A half million population of fifty years average span has the same total life years, but it has fifteen million mature life years, which is three-fifths of its total life years, against only one-fifth in the former instance. So, notwithstanding that numerically it is far inferior, the second population as a whole exhibits three times as much power and capacity for building a civilization and for cultural growth. Thus a society so organized and so ordered as to extend the adult lives of its members can increase its qualitative energy and resulting civilization at a greater rate than it increases the number of its individuals, indeed, even though there might be great decline in the numerical population.

 

   The comparisons thus far made between populations having equivalent life years have been as to their creative power or social potentiality as a whole, notwithstanding their great numerical difference. Now look at the individual: For the average individual the ratio of advantage is twice as high; for in the second population the average individual was found to possess thirty mature life years, and this is not merely three times but six times greater than in the case of the more numerous population.

 

   It is thus seen that whatever more advantageous mode of association, whatever growth and improvement of the economic and social organization within itself brings about conditions that extend the adult life of the individual, even if accompanied by a fifty percent reduction in numbers, can, as in the given illustration, bring about a three-fold improvement in the positive capacities of the society as a whole; and this is accompanied not by any sacrifice but by a six fold enhancement of the opportunity and possibilities of the average individual in the less numerous but more effectively conducted society.

 

   It is clear, then, that a social organization that has the effect of lengthening the lives of its members without any necessary increase in its numbers, or even in its total life years, will achieve a condition precisely the reverse and transcending that of a population dominated either by anarchical forces among its members or by a coercive and predacious political state that, imposing force instead of freedom upon its individuals not only destroys them directly, but so restricts the transformation of energy through free exchange relationships as to cause mere numbers to increase by thus cutting down subsistence and therefore the average duration of its individual lives.

 

  For a century and more the available statistical data have indicated a lengthening of the human life span. During the National period in this country /the United States/, the span is said to have been raised from about thirty to nearly sixty years, or nearly doubled in a century and a half. Doubtless this has been due to an unexampled freedom during most of this period from governmental restraints and a consequent enormous extension of the area, complexity and productivity of free contractual relations with an increasing rise in the level of subsistence and enormous improvement in the physical and other conditions favorable to the extension of life. This has made possible the almost complete extirpation of plagues and pestilence and a huge diminution in the incidence of disease among the middle and older groups. Also this has vastly more than offset any increase in death or incapacity from accidental and mechanical causes. These optimal influences coming rapidly upon a population initially endowed with a very high biologic fertility, made possible a rapid rise in numbers concurrently with the lengthening of their days. Until recent years the great influx of similar persons and of property from abroad, seeking a field of freer and wider contractual engagements and employment, resulted in a great addition to and acceleration of the native increase. Two reverse influences have now so diminished the upward trend that predictions of a stationary or declining population within the next forty years are being freely made. These influences are the cessation of immigration and a declining fertility, especially, if not exclusively, among those classes and areas of population that have achieved the highest economic productivity and, therefore, the most ample subsistence and favorable conditions for lengthening their average life span. This decline of fertility in the most productive and better placed elements and regions and the consequent relatively increasing reproductive rates among the less productive, more diseased and shorter lived elements of the population have been the cause of much sad prediction and anxious speculation.

 

  Three terrors beset the minds of these sad predictionists. One is that the relatively high birth rate among the less favored and least intelligent classes will degrade the population to a race of morons. The reassurance here is that most of such children die too young to make any considerable or permanent addition to the population. If they are born rapidly, so do they die rapidly. The other terror is that the general birth rate may continue to fall and the race thereby perish. This comes from insufficient attention being given to the positive quantitative effect on numbers that comes from a diminished mortality, especially among the young, and practically no account at all being taken of the immense qualitative improvement in the economic productivity and cultural capacity that result from the lengthening of the span. The third terror is that the “aging of the population” will take place chiefly at its upper age limits and thus crush a diminishing number of the young under a multiplying burden of dependence and senility in the persons of those whose lives are being prolonged. The current clamor for pensions and doles for “senior citizens” lends color to this. Such apprehensions rest on either ignorance or inexcusable disregard of the known distribution of the added years over the several age groups. All statistical data support the common observation that the increased longevity affects almost exclusively the very young and those of mature and middle years, and the very old, probably not at all, for there are no data to indicate any lengthening of life beyond what has long remained the extremes of old age. On the contrary, it seems probable that the nervous tension and intensity of contemporary life has increased the acute causes of death among those whose years are extended into the past-middle-aged group, thus diminishing both invalidism and senile decay.

 

   In its every aspect the lengthening life span with declining fertility arising out of high contractual freedom and productivity seems wholly eugenic. The energy of a high biologic turnover is carried over into the mature years available for sociological functioning as creative work upon the environment. Re-productivity is transformed into social productivity.

 

   Reversely, the differential birth rate in favor of those whose social and contractual power has not developed or has been degraded into mere biological power also is eugenic, in a negative and indirect sense, under the adverse circumstances that shorten lives, in that it provides a wider numerical field in which favorable variations and mutations may take place among the members of the population. Such a population, by converting its shortening lives into more numerous ones, broadens its base and lays the foundation for its own possible improvement and redemption through the emergence of individuals so gifted as to reestablish the free and productive social relationships for lack or failure of which their predecessors suffered shortened lives. The importance of a high frequency of births to compensate the shortening of lives under the compulsions of a low or declining state of social organization can well be realized by taking thought of the necessary consequence of a reverse procedure taking place; for if the shortened lives were to be replaced only by less frequent births, it is clear that extinction of the race must be approached at an accelerating rate.

 

   Among the higher organisms, those having structures and functions beyond what is necessary to reproduction, the more propitious the conditions for extending the individual lives the less reproductive they become. The population whose voluntary social and cooperative processes (as distinguished from external or internal coercion upon it) are freest to serve and thus extend the lives of its individuals is the population whose reproductivity will decline while the life and power of its members and the quantity and quality of its own total power is enhanced. And this is true, though numerically the population remain stationary, or even decline, for where the lives are lengthened and made secure there they need not and they will not be rapidly renewed.

 

   In all animate nature this correlation between life-span and reproductivity is very great. The higher the hazards and the perils the more prolific the organism becomes. A plant shortened in its stem multiplies its stalks and, nipped its prime, springs up again only to bear seeds. The animal forms whose lives are perilous and brief, and who otherwise would face extinction, must produce numerous young. Those societal practices and arrangements under which the members, being least free and most coerced, must earliest perish make them fore-handed and most sedulous to reproduce. At all levels of persisting life the fecundity of the species rises or falls with the shortening or the lengthening of its days. Nature smiles upon her subtler and more complex forms; and where time permits she endows her individuals with worth and beauty while relinquishing the quantitative prudence that shapes her paths to these.

 

   From all the above, it seems that the physical law of conservation of energy, or some analogue of it, rules also in the organic and the social world. The energy that nature assigns to and continues to manifest in a population is subject to being variously transformed. It may resolve itself into fewer units or individuals having a more extended energy content and powers, or it may dissolve itself among many individuals of less enduring powers. Such transformations do not depend upon any quantitative change. Under a transformation that is integrative, as the units are magnified, their numbers decline. Under a disintegrative trend, the individuals are diminished and their numbers enlarged. This is obvious as to material objects when the measurement is as to their mass or dimensions in space. The larger the parts the fewer their numbers must be. It is no less true in the measurement of living things in terms of their energy content expressed by their duration in time. The longer the individuals live — the less frequently they die, — the less frequently must they be reproduced and replaced. If the stream of life is to be maintained, then the more frequently its units pass out the more frequently must they be reproduced and renewed. Like all other phenomena, all other change, death and birth must remain but transfers and transformations of and within the universal energy. Both time and materials, process and mass, come alike under one law.

 

   The social organism, like every other complex life-form, is an integration of lesser organisms, a congeries of constituent and more or less modified and specialized parts. As its body is a mass integration of parts, so its life is their integration in time or change. This time or change relationship, this energy exchange between its units, is the basic process or general function whereby the complex organism grows and is maintained and whence arise also all its specific functions and powers. In the social or community organization, this basic metabolism is called trade or exchange, and service is the name for the energy that is transformed and transferred. While this basic reciprocal process is free and unimpaired, the organism grows into and practices all of its powers. When it is unbalanced and constrained, the organic structure is shaken, the functioning of its individual parts is impaired and they decay.

 

   Just as every particular derives from and is still a part of its universal, so every life form, biological or social, constitutes itself out of its environment. It is created by the whole of which it is still a part, and from the whole it must constantly draw its substance and its strength — all of the energy with which for its entire duration it is endowed. Its capacity to draw this energy depends upon its self, upon its interior organization, upon the relations and interactions between its own units and parts. If the organization is efficient and not destructive of its own parts, its capacity is high, its life-duration long.

 

   Thus biological organization may be stated as capacity to utilize environment. The social organization serves a still higher end for man. It does not merely utilize and thus deteriorate its environment, as biological organizations do; it rebuilds and re­creates and so dominates the environing world into a servant of its needs and desires. But this dominion creates the earth into a higher order of functioning complexity; it does not disintegrate or destroy. So far as the interactions among its members rise to the level of freedom and service by consent and exchange, so far as free contractual relations supervene upon the primitive and compulsive, the social or community life-form achieves its growth and power over its environment by its integration into service relationships of

the higher and ampler lives of its individual members. And, conversely, every encroachment of compulsive power, either anarchical or governmental, upon the fields of service that are ruled only by voluntary contract, consent and exchange cuts down the life and power of the individual, deteriorates environment, and thus impairs the vitality and length of days of the society as a whole. To the extent that this basic metabolism of the social organism is inhibited or impaired, so must all its life and power fail; man falls from his sovereignty, and his dominion over the earth declines.

 

   The social mechanism for extension of the technique of property and contract, of the service and exchange relationship, into public and community affairs is to be discovered in the exist­ing institution of property in land and natural resources. It is only necessary to examine property in land with respect to the community services it now silently and unconsciously carries on to bring to light the almost boundless possibilities of constructive public and community services and earned profits and values that lie latent and undiscovered in that basic social institution.[1]

 

   The mode of social analysis in terms of energy transfers thus far considered with reference to a society as a whole should be found similarly illuminating as to any of the specific institutions or functional groups of which it is constituted, and particularly as to that primary and fundamental institution of contract and exchange known as property in land.

 

   The first requisite to community life is a cessation of arbitrary possession and a social and consensual holding and distribution of its sites and resources. Until this convention of acknowledging property in land arises there can be no exchange of services; no other contractual engagements can be entered into or performed. By common consent of all, the society accepts the claims of those in possession. Thenceforth all new changes of possession are by a process of peace and consent, by a contractual distribution in place of the former compulsive one, and with a social security of possession under property ad contract, that neither previously nor otherwise could be obtained.

 

   This making of a social distribution of sites and resources by the accepted proprietors is the primary and underlying social service by means of which men achieve the possibility of freedom, under contractual relationships, instead of savagery or tyranny under those of compulsion and force.

 

   The process of transforming savage human energy into social and consensual forms begins with the adoption of a proprietary and contractual relationship among and between the individuals as regards the possession of sites and resources. Upon the security so obtained they create for each other services and commodities. These created things they pool in a common market and there, in turn, make a proprietary or contractual distribution of these artificial things precisely as they first make distribution of the things of nature by property in land. From this process of property and service by exchange comes all the abundance, the enlargement, the prolongation and elevation of the individual lives that it is the function of the social organization to serve.

 

   However blind the members may remain as to the integrative and creative social effects that grow out of their trafficking to each other of possession and of services, and of commodities into which services have been wrought, however little each in his feeling or thought may regard the welfare of others or of the whole, still he must give services to others if others shall be either willing or able to return services to him. By this automatic functioning of its parts, the individual and group welfare is insured and advanced. By thus raising both the intensity and the duration of the individual lives the social integration is effected and the societal structure maintained. This energy transfer by exchange gives rise to all that fine division of labor upon and transformation of the materials of the earth and environment for the fit habitation and maintenance of mankind. From this comes the abundance of individual life and its fullness of years.

 

   For the measurement of this process, we cannot directly employ the scientific units of mass, dimension and duration as pounds, feet and minutes, but we know that there must be for the average individual an average mass and velocity — an average energy rate. Taking this as unity, or, as any constant quantity, sufficiently defines our mean social unit as to all other components, but it does not define its total potential or durational factor. This is the average number of life years per individual or, more simply, the average duration of life, or age at death, and this latter we obtain from statistical sources. Thus in unity (or any constant) we have an expression for the mass and velocity component of the total energy of the average individuals, and in the time, span or duration, we have a value by which to multiply the mass-velocity component to obtain an expression for the mean total energy per life.

 

   Now a single individual in a population has but little variability of mass and none as to his total duration. But for a population, both mass and duration may be highly variable over a given period. Its mass variability is expressed in its changing number of individuals, — by what is commonly called changes in the population. But the variability of its time or duration component is expressed by the changing average life span of its individuals. So a given quantity of population taken as a quantity of energy must ever be the product of the two variables, of average numbers into average duration, both averages being taken over a given period.

 

   The number of years per generation represents the frequency or duration of the lives in the successive generations. The numerical population represents their number or mass. Like all other energy, life is manifested by numbers times duration or frequency. Thus in population-energy, in a given period, mass is represented by the average numerical population and frequency or duration by the average number of years per generation, which is, of course, only one way of stating the number of generations per year (or per century). Frequency and duration are one and the same. Frequency of vibrations is commonly expressed either by their number per second or by the duration of each in seconds or fractions of a second.

 

   If, therefore, a population over a given period is to represent a constant amount of energy (or practically so) it is impossible to make any change in the number of individuals without making a contrary change in their duration. In like manner, no change can be made in the average duration of the lives without making a contrary change in their average numbers. More briefly when the given quantity of energy runs into brevity and frequency of its units, it must run into numbers; when it runs into length and duration of its units it numbers must go down.

 

   Just as an individual acting only upon himself has determination or jurisdiction over none but his internal organization or economy, so a society must exercise its primary jurisdiction over and determination of itself before it can transform the structure and energy of its environing world. It is first necessary to organize its members into the societal life form. In this its structure and energy is transformed without any necessary augmentation or loss; there is a qualitative change alone. But as this change is effected the environment becomes favorably transformed. The primary effect of this is to raise the potential or duration of the individual lives. But this has also the further effect of increasing the total portion of cosmic or universal energy that can be transformed into and sustained in the form of human lives. Thus the society as a whole, by pooling in its markets the services and products of its individual members and groups, not only serves and sustains them into larger and higher and, therefore, fewer lives but, at the same time, also so transforms the structure and energy of its environment that increasing quantities of human life may emerge — nature herself being cast increasingly into the human process, form and mould.

 

   A generation of life years is a wave of energy. This wave may transform itself from many lives of few years into few lives of many years, or the reverse transformation may take place, without any quantitative change. The relation between the energy available for any kind of creative process or activity and the total population energy in any wave or generation of life years is formulated and summarized /as follows:/

 

 

PROPOSED FUNDAMENTAL FORMULA FOR QUANTITATIVE

MEASUREMENT OF POPULATION AS LIFE-ENERGY

 

 

AVERAGE RATE OF WORK, Output per Individual

                        (taken as unity)                     1

 

times                        x

 

AVERAGE DURATION OF WORK, Average Life-Span of

Individuals Ascertained over a Sufficient

                       Period (years)                      D

 

times                        x

 

         AVERAGE NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS Living During

         the Time Embraced Within the Average Life-Span      N

 

                              equals                         =

 

TOTAL WORK OR ENERGY FLOW Manifested in those

        Numbers During that Time (Expressed in Life-Years)   W

 

 

 

PROPOSED FUNDAMENTAL FORMULA FOR QUALITATIVE

MEASUREMENT OF POPULATION AS LIFE-ENERGY AVAILABLE

FOR SOCIAL GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT

 

HUMAN ENERGY in Total Life-Years

 

 DN = W                      W

 

 minus                       –

 

LIFE-YEARS OF INFANCY 20N

               (Re-creative Physio-Biologically)            20N

 

equals                        =

 

ADULT LIFE-YEARS Available for Social Growth

            and Development (Creative Sociologically)   N(D-20)

 

 

 

OPTIMUM QUALITATIVE CONDITIONS:

 

For any given quantity of population energy, W, the

condition of highest quality, active and creative

capacity, is when D, average duration, is maximum

and N, number of individuals, is therefore minimum.

 

 

 

COEFFICIENT OF SOCIAL POTENTIALITY — POSSIBLE

SOCIOLOGICAL EFFICIENCY:

 

E = N (D-20)

   W

 

 

It is essential to note that the co-efficient of sociological efficiency is based on the energy that is available for creative activity. It therefore indicates not the actual but the possible sociological efficiency under any specific organization of the population energy. It refers not to achievement but to potentiality or possible achievement under the given conditions.

 

   The cosmic energy that organizes itself in the matured structure of an individual or of a generation of men is a biological and not a social or societal manifestation; only the energy possessed by a society above that which is necessary to the physiological growth and maintenance of its members can take any societal form or function in any social processes. Every society employs some portion of this socially available energy in its own growth or maintenance as a societal life-form. The energy available but not thus employed cannot be blotted out. It must, therefore, manifest itself in some anti-social processes or forms.

 

   The social process is that of free and non-violent energy transfers between and among the members. This is the basic function or social metabolism whereby the societal life-form grows and is maintained. These energy transfers are mutual. They are carried on by contract and consent and exchange. This requires that things must be owned, for it is not possible to exchange energies or services without the employment of instruments or things, and only those things which are owned can be exchanged or used as instruments of exchange. The convention of ownership is, therefore, necessary with respect to land or the things or nature, as well as with respect to the things of artifice and production in order that the social energy which men have for each other may be adequately exchanged and thus take the form of services to the respective recipients.

 

   The available energy not so transferred becomes destructive. It takes the pre-social and predatory form of coercion, compulsion, slavery, tribute, taxation, government (other than protection and services) tyranny and war. It is not to be inferred that the public authority in a society can never resort legitimately to force or fraud. When it practices force or fraud upon itself or upon any of its members, it maims itself eventually, even to the point of social suicide, as has often occurred. The legitimate and the constructive field for the use of force or fraud, is upon those individuals or groups who have never entered into the exchange relationship which constitutes the society or upon those who have either temporarily or permanently abandoned that relationship. Such persons or groups, by their own violent and deceitful actions, place themselves outside of the social organization — as much outside of it in effect as is the animal and plant and the inorganic world. The social organization, therefore, sometimes requires as an essential service to itself and its members the application of coercive discipline upon those whose resort to violence or fraud tends to injure, enslave or destroy the society or any of its members, denies or dissolves their membership and makes them, for the time at least, outlaw to the social body.

 

   All the vital energy of a population above that requisite for replacement is available for social growth and functioning but, as has been shown, only a part and not all of it is so employed, the remainder manifesting itself in conflict, waste and war. Of the part that is socially employed the primary application is in the contractual holding and distribution of sites and resources by means of property in land. Apart from this primary and most essential community service, the technique of social-izing human energy by the constructive methods of contract, consent and exchange — by the voluntary assuming of obligations and performance of services for recompense by exchange — finds its application almost entirely in those services which are private and exclusive to particular individuals. The energy that is not thus social-ized operates in the field of those services that the members of society must have in common in order that they may communicate and exchange privately and individually with one another. In this public and governmental field the energy flow is by way of coercions and compulsions, force and dissimulation. Unfortunately, any voluntary or contractual method of raising revenue or recompense for the chosen or tolerated political authority is at present unknown. Such authority obtains all its revenue and recompense in advance of its promised services, taking it by force majeure as seizures, so far as practicable, and beyond that by promises in the form of public debt which it hopes to repay out of future seizures but is seldom if ever able finally to do so. The impact of this force and essential fraud, however honorably intended and universally accepted, upon the pro-social system of property and voluntary exchanges undermines ownership and all the obligations of contract and service so based. It thus destroys values, inhibits all the social processes and brings on widespread distress and disintegration and the recurrent wars by which compulsive and destructive power integrates into gaudy or brilliant empires that bankrupt themselves and must collapse and sink into periods of darkness and relative barbarism.

 

/Note: There are two pages numbered 37 in the typescript. It is presumed that what is transcribed here was intended to supersede the first such page./

 

   All wrong and wars are but the persistence of the social organism in trying blindly and vainly to conduct its public and general affairs on the basis of compulsion, deceit and default instead of by contract, consent and exchange, as it has learned to conduct the private services. The one has been learned, the other remains to be learned; but the technique must be the same. The voluntary contractual relationships of ownership of property and of the services exchanged thereby and therewith on the basis of agreement and consent, needs to be extended into the field of community property and services. Only in the degree that this principle is applied in public affairs can the at-present available but unsocial-ized energy be brought into creative services and thus cease to manifest itself in destructive tyrannies and recurrent wars. The specific technique for social-izing this destructive energy is to be discovered by examination of the institution of property in land with respect to the public services of distribution that it now performs solely on the basis of contract and consent. Once the basic function of this institution is clearly seen, it becomes immediately apparent how it can be extended to other and eventually to the entire field of public and governmental services entirely by free and democratic engagements and enterprise and with enormous increase of freedom and of income and values of every kind.

 

   With public community authority resting only upon community ownership and thus having no coercion but only free contractual and, therefore, mutual service relationships with the community inhabitants and recipients of the community services, both protective and positive, the entire available life-years of energies in the population could be drawn upon and freely engaged in the production and mutual exchange of services and goods and in the free artistries of the creative spirit, the emancipated mind.

 

   For the free technique that is peculiar to the market, the freedom to serve and to be served by consent and exchange, as it becomes more universal must so release the distribution of physical things that their production will (can) rise far above the material needs of mankind. The lengthening (mature) life years of the race need be devoted only in small part to the things that are necessary in order to live, the things to which they are bound but which (that) can only serve and pass and do not abide. This efficiency and economy at the physical base emancipates the energies of the population from the compulsions imposed by their material and physical needs and releases them to the unforced and spontaneous expression of creative power. It releases a whole population to do what in the crude and only partly social-ized condition is denied to the many and reserved to the few — the practice of creative artistries in all the free adventures of spirit and mind. This is the free realm of spirit rising out of but transcending the compulsions imposed by the physical and necessitous world. The things created here are real in the sense that they are abiding: they do not pass away. These creations of joy and inspiration, these services of the spirit and the imagination transcend the material services of the market as the free and voluntary engagements of contract in the market transcend the crude compulsive and destructive technique of government and all the strongholds of protection and power. The market maintains the creative and inspirational arts just as it supports the citadel and seats of power. But these things of the spirit — children of the altar, the temple, symposium and school — in their intangible forms cannot be traded or exchanged: nor need they be, for in this realm the givers are more enriched in the giving than are those who receive. Their original services and creations, their discoveries and formulations can be performed only once and they remain the eternal heritage of mankind. As the services are esthetic and spiritual, so is the reward — and none other is sought or desired.

 

   Survival and advancement seem to be the prerogatives of those organizational forms, whether biological or social, in which the associated members, be they simple cells or highly organized individual units, are best and most served by free energy transformation and exchanges among themselves and in which the lives of the constituent units are thus most advanced and prolonged. This process is the efficient employment by a population of its vital energy, above that requisite for reproduction and replacements. It is the transformation of this surplus energy (by division of labor) into service forms and its unimpeded redistribution by voluntary exchange for the automatic elevation of the units of which the population is composed. Quality and value and beauty can arise only from the choice of alternatives. They must spring from that higher individual power and determination that gives freedom from compulsions and liberty to choose. They are social products and derivatives proceeding from the higher energy endowments and potentialities which the social process of exchanging energy in free contractual relationships, and, thus in service forms, confers on the individual lives.

 

   This building up of the life and energy of the unit seems to be the prime function of the social organization. An accessory or collateral function appears to be, through exchange and cooperative power, to transform and rebuild the natural world into correspondence with its population’s needs and desires. The ultimate and total function of the societal life-form may well be a progressive and indefinite extension and elaboration of individual life and power in a progressively and indefinitely transformed world.

 

   A society has three basic needs. It remains a society only so far as it finds creative and non-destructive ways to serve these needs. It must have security that its members may have property and the consequent high subsistence that is necessary to an abundant and, thereby, a spiritual life for all. These three needs, security, property and spirituality, are supplied through the institution of politics and government, of commerce and trade and of religion and the arts. They originate in and may be symbolized by the citadel, the market-place, and the altar. They are not always as separate and distinct in organization as they are in function, but they tend to be so and are the more efficient as they become distinct, and as they serve each other without conflict or domination. Institutions like men can prosper and grow only as they subordinate the primitive relationships of dominance and subjection by force and deceit, and establish among and between themselves the mutual relationship of service through consent and exchange.

 

   The concept of population as an organization of rhythmic energy contains implications that are wide and deep. It brings the societal form of human life within the scope of the authentic and objective sciences. So doing, it finds, in those populations in which the units of living energy are so organized as to lengthen their generations as pulsation between birth and death, a power to transform and rebuild the system of environment whence they spring. In this positive technique it glimpses a creative, and in that sense a spiritual, world. Here it seems to discover organized mankind as derived from a self-existent universe and, through its powers so derived, able itself to become self-existing and self-creating by recreating its environing world into its own likeness and desire. It seems to unite science and philosophy at the point where, in the organization of living energy into waves of less frequency and longer duration, positively qualitative and creative powers arise out of and upon the merely quantitative. It lays the ground work for objective appraisements and examinations of the positive and creative, the power-giving and harmonious, contractual relationships among men in the institution of property and its administration by voluntary services under the free technique of contract and exchange.

 

   The energy concept affords the necessary ground for a truly rational and scientific approach to the three basic institutions of associated men: The Citadel, the place first of protection, then of compulsive tyrant government, enslavement and war; The Market-place, where peace descends upon the wings of freedom, and compulsions give way to contract and accord, where conflict is banished in the concord of consent and exchange; and, lastly: The place of the Altar, where fears resolve to hopes and grow to faiths, where inspirations descend and aspirations arise, the place where the symposium is born and the temple rises to shelter it as the cathedral fosters the college and the school, the place whence religion sends out its flame, where the temple cradles the muses, faith flowers in the arts, and philosophy, fostering freedom, feeds the torch of science, — the place whence all that is creative in man sends out its light and where all things of the mind and spirit find their ancient and their native home.

 

   All these living institutions of society and of men are in and of the system of nature no less than are the atoms and the stars. They have grown up without the conscious will of man and without his understanding, and so they have but partially and imperfectly served. Only for want of man’s conscious acceptance, understanding and appreciation and efficient use of them do they waver and decay. Some there are who in blind anger or despair would assail the citadel, manacle the peace and productiveness, the services and freedoms of the common market and desecrate even the altar with the chains and wheels of government and war. But Science is a new wonder-child born of the altar and the arts and nourished and sustained by the market. She has a dispassionate eye that deals only with Light, and once she turns her face and faith towards the organization and the institutions of men her golden rays will resolve the beauty and truth, the creative harmonies, that pervade the wide and common relationships of men just as surely and as truly as she reveals them in the natural world and has made in that realm so many dreams come true and the creative will of man so near supreme.